“Yeah!” The younger girl looked like Shirley Temple in pink denim coveralls. “We want to see the DOA!”
Inwardly cursing TV crime shows, I chose my words carefully.
“It would be most useful to the case if you’d collect your thoughts, talk over your observations, and then give a statement. Could you do that?”
The two looked at each other, eyes grown from saucers to platters.
“Yeah,” said Shirley Temple, clapping chubby hands. “We’ll give cool statements.”
The crime scene truck arrived at four. Joe Hawkins, the MCME death investigator on call that weekend, showed up a few minutes later. By then most of the McCranies’ guests had folded their blankets and chairs and departed.
So had Katy, Palmer, and Boyd.
Boyd’s discovery lay beyond the hedge dividing the McCranies’ property from the adjacent farm. According to Sarah’s father, no one occupied the neighboring house, which belonged to someone named Foote. A quick check drew no response, so we brought in our equipment through its driveway and yard.
I explained the situation to Hawkins as two crime scene techs unloaded cameras, shovels, screens, and other equipment we’d need for processing.
“It may be an animal carcass,” I said, feeling apprehensive about calling people out on a Saturday.
“Or it may be some guy’s wife with an ax in her head.” Hawkins pulled a body bag from his transport van. “Ain’t our job to second-guess.”
Joe Hawkins had been hauling stiffs since DiMaggio and Monroe married in ’54, and was about to hit mandatory retirement age. He could tell some stories. Autopsies were performed in the basement of the jail back then, in a room equipped with little more than a table and sink. When North Carolina overhauled its death investigation system in the eighties, and the Mecklenburg County ME facility was moved to its current location, Hawkins took only one memento: an autographed portrait of Joltin’ Joe. The picture still sat on the desk in his cubicle.
“But if we’ve got a bad one,
“Deal,” I agreed.
Hawkins slammed the van’s double doors. I couldn’t help thinking how the job had molded the man’s physiognomy. Cadaver thin, with dark circles under puffy eyes, bushy brows, and dyed black hair combed straight back from his face, Hawkins looked like a death investigator from central casting.
“Think we’ll need lights?” asked one of the techs, a woman in her twenties with blotchy skin and granny glasses.
“Let’s see how it goes.”
“All set?”
I looked at Hawkins. He nodded.
“Let’s do her,” said granny glasses.
I led the team into the woods, and for the next two hours we photographed, cleared, bagged, and tagged according to ME protocol.
Not a leaf stirred. My hair bonded to my neck and forehead, and my clothes grew damp inside the Tyvek jumpsuit Hawkins had brought me. Despite liberal applications of Hawkins’s Deep Woods, mosquitoes feasted on every millimeter of exposed flesh.
By five we had a pretty good idea of what we were facing.
A large black trash bag had been placed in a shallow grave, then covered with a layer of soil and leaves. Close to the ground surface, wind and erosion had taken their toll, finally exposing one corner of the bag. Boyd had accomplished the rest.
Beneath the first bag, we discovered a second. Though we left both sealed, except for such tears and holes as they already had, the odor oozing from the sacks was unmistakable. It was the sweet, fetid stench of decomposing flesh.
The fact that the remains appeared to be limited to their packaging sped our processing time. By six we’d removed the sacks, sealed them in body bags, and placed the bags in the ME van. After receiving assurances that granny glasses and her partner and I would be fine, Hawkins set off for the morgue.
An hour of screening turned up nothing from the surrounding or underlying soil.
By seven-thirty we’d packed the truck and were rolling toward town.
By nine I was in my shower, exhausted, discouraged, and wishing I’d chosen another profession.
Just when I thought I was catching up, two fifty-gallon Heftys had entered my life.
Damn!
And a seventy-pound chow.
Damn!
I lathered my hair for the third time and thought about the day to come and my visitor. Could I get through the bags before meeting him at baggage claim?
I pictured a face, and my stomach did a mini-flip.
Oh, boy.
